Dividing the Faith - Richard J. Boles Early American Places

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her from the church’s fellowship for moral failings. After owning the covenant, Phillis was baptized. Next, Adams baptized Phillis’s children James, Ziba, and Sylvanus, as well as a “servant child Ishmael.” Ishmael was the child of another of Adams’s slaves. Adams promised to educate these four children in Christianity as part of his responsibility as their metaphorical patriarch, a role typically assumed by English masters of bound laborers, when he stated, “for all whose education I also publically engaged.”2

      For Eliphalet Adams, the sacrament of baptism was a sacred duty performed regularly for the children of believing parents and adults who owned the covenant or made a profession of faith in Christ. Infants, children, and adults could all receive this sacrament, either on the testimony of a guardian’s faith or by their own profession. He baptized fifty-seven people in 1738. For Phillis, the meaning and significance of her baptism are unclear as historical records provide no access to her words or thoughts. Perhaps Adams used promises or threats to pressure her into being baptized, or perhaps she made a choice herself to do so. Although a minority in the New London church, Phillis and her children were hardly the only nonwhite worshippers. In the 1730s and 1740s, at least sixteen Indians (nine adults and seven children) and fifteen blacks (eight adults and seven children) were baptized at this church. These baptisms were a small but noticeable minority among the roughly 1,080 baptisms performed there during this era, and the black people baptized at this church represented a small percentage of the enslaved population of the New London region.3 The trend of black and Indian baptisms, though, was not limited to one location. People of color from across the region joined predominantly white churches as individuals and in small groups. Collectively, they were making those churches more representative of the diversity in British colonial societies.

      In the 1730s and 1740s, long before separate black churches were formed, black Christians regularly attended and joined predominantly white churches. Although separate Indian churches dating back to the middle of the seventeenth century existed in Massachusetts, Indians also participated in predominantly white churches. In these two decades, significant numbers of blacks and Indians were baptized in Congregational churches in New England, Anglican churches from Pennsylvania to New Hampshire, and some Lutheran and Moravian churches in Mid-Atlantic colonies. Strikingly, most people in southern New England and a significant minority of people in the rest of the northern colonies experienced formal religion in interracial contexts between 1730 and 1749.

      The participation of black and Indian peoples in so many of these churches is significant for several reasons. White Christians by the eighteenth century frequently believed it was their religious duty to teach blacks and Indians the doctrines of Christianity and to invite them into their churches. They thought that churches ought to contain all parts of their hierarchical society, and numerous pastors and congregants made strides in putting this ideal into practice. In some other colonies, Europeans adopted a model of Christian practice that sought to delineate boundaries of “whiteness” from “blackness” by excluding enslaved black people from churches.4 In contrast, northern Congregational, Anglican, Lutheran, and Moravian churches generally felt that the participation of blacks and Indians in their churches helped justify their existing social order, including whites’ elevated status therein. Since blacks and Indians were active in numerous churches, racial identities and slavery were created and contested in these spaces and upon religious terms. Moreover, it is crucial to examine black and Indian participation in colonial churches because it contextualizes and explains the multifaceted origins of Native American and African American forms of Christianity. In order to understand how and why churches eventually became divided along perceived racial lines, we must first understand the extent to which churches were interracial.

      Even though black and Indian Christians produced few written records in this era, the patterns of their affiliation in predominantly white churches tell us much about their religious experiences. Levels of black and Indian affiliation can best be determined through baptismal and membership lists; no sources indicate how many people attended church services regularly week after week. Many churches were interracial religious communities, meaning that blacks and Indians engaged in the same religious activities as whites, including baptism, communion, public worship, singing, catechism classes, and other shared religious events. When white ministers baptized blacks and Indians or admitted them to membership, these ministers and church leaders envisioned that these people would one day be in heaven too. They imagined a spiritual community that transcended their specific time and place.

      The interracial practices of churches in northern colonies contrast with the more segregated religious practices in some British slave societies. In other colonies, slave owners were more determined to prevent enslaved black people from participating in churches. In South Carolina, Barbados, and Jamaica, white people were often baptized and married in the private spaces of their homes to distinguish themselves from the small number of free and enslaved black people who were baptized and married in Anglian church buildings. White people in northern colonies did not separate their baptisms from church settings to distinguish their baptisms from those of black or Indian peoples. But, creating interracial churches was not the same as treating blacks and Indians as equals, which was not the goal of white colonists.5

      The impressive extent of black and Indian participation in northern Protestant churches meaningfully amends our understanding of the Great Awakening’s effect on the origins of African American and Native American Christianities. The participation of black and Indian people in churches was varied and not inherently connected to the Great Awakening. The Great Awakening was a disruptive period of religious controversy that dramatically changed the religious composition of New England. It was particularly connected to the traveling preaching tours of Reverend George Whitefield. Although religious awakenings occurred in earlier periods, later commentators and historians identify the revivals that occurred in the early 1740s as the Great Awakening because of the intense upsurges of religious activity that occurred in New England and also in locations across the British Atlantic world. Early forms of African American Christianity are often closely associated with evangelical revivalism, including the radical elements of the Great Awakening. However, black men and women did not solely participate in the churches that promoted or embraced awakenings. They also affiliated with Congregational, Anglican, and Lutheran churches that opposed the new revival techniques, sometimes in substantial numbers.6

      Some scholars of religious history have overstated the role of revivalism and the Great Awakening in explaining black and Indian Christian practices in northern colonies. The emotional preaching and lay involvement in religious services of the Great Awakening played a role in black and Indian participation, but scholars have misidentified it as the primary—or even the only—source of their affiliation in Christian churches.7 In some of the New England churches that became centers of revivalism, Indian and black participation increased from hardly any adherents to a noticeable minority of members. Some pastors who promoted revivals, such as Reverends James Davenport and Daniel Rogers, brought groups of Indians or blacks into Congregational churches.8 The Great Awakening encouraged higher numbers of blacks and Indians to enter churches, but such participation was not necessarily tied to the prorevival theology or styles of preaching. Blacks and Indians participated in churches before Whitefield’s famous preaching tour of 1739–1740, and they joined churches whose ministers emphatically opposed Whitefield and other revivalists, so there were multiple origins of African American and Indian forms of Christianity.

      I argue that the forms of Christianity practiced by eighteenth-century blacks and Indians were nearly as varied as the forms of Christianity practiced by the European colonists. The Great Awakening increased minorities’ church participation in total, but “revivalism” or “the Great Awakening” are insufficient explanations for black and Indian peoples’ affiliation in a wide variety of churches. They participated in Congregational, Anglican, Lutheran, and Moravian congregations. Moreover, the churches they joined ranged from passionately “New Light” (revivalist, “Whitefieldarian,” or evangelical) congregations that sought to stir up revivals to staunchly traditionalist (“Old Light”) ones opposed to religious excesses that disrupted communal unity. The evidence to support this argument is divided by northern regions because the New England colonies and Mid-Atlantic colonies contained different religious landscapes. After a section that addresses motivations for religious affiliation, this chapter progresses to a section about

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